How one designer led an AI revolution at Pendo: The paternity leave epiphany | Brian Greenbaum

I had tried Cursor for the first time, and what I was able to create just blew me away. I sent a message to my manager, my manager's manager, the CPO, and then a few other folks that I knew were really interested in AI, and I was like: "Listen, I had this really profound experience, and I think we really need to uplevel the skill of our entire product organization, not just designers, but also PMs. We need to become more familiar with this technology. We need to understand how we can use it." This is actually the message that I sent while I was on paternity leave that definitely got my leaders really fired up. I didn't know exactly how this was gonna go. All I knew was that I needed to get more folks paying attention to this AI stuff.

If you are the first to [chuckles] raise your hand that says, "You know what? I wanna figure out how our team can use AI. I'm gonna lead this organization," it's such a unique leadership opportunity to show cross-functional, broad impact on teams. [upbeat music] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I have Brian Greenbaum at Pendo, and he's gonna show us not only how he uses AI in his own product work, but his step-by-step plan for getting your product and design teams adopting AI as well. Let's get to it.

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Brian, thanks for joining us on How I AI. Happy to have you.

Yeah, so excited to be here.

Well, what I am excited about in our conversation is in a lot of our How I AI episodes, we've shown specific ways that you can s- use specific tools to build or do things with AI. And you're gonna help us take a step back and say, you know, let's say you have all these tools, and you want to start using them. How do you get a full team or a full organization, a full company, actually adopting AI? And so this is a how I get everybody else to [chuckles] use AI episode. So I would love to start with what I call the inception phase, which we all have gone through or are all in the process of trying to get our team to go through, which is when you get people excited and sort of jumpstart the energy around AI. And I think you approached this in a really interesting way, so I'd love you to walk us through what you did at Pendo.